Jean Piaget's Development: The Four Stages Of Logical Development

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The four stages of intellectual growth play a vast role in determining the cognitive ability in a young child. “The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge, but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things (McLeod, 2012).” Every piece of technology that’s used today was not thought of by the smartest person in the world, it was thought up of by someone who was simply had the imagination and creativity in their head to discover it. This Jean Piaget quote explains just what intellectual growth is -- it’s about opening up ideas to create, not becoming the smartest. Jean Piaget was the creator of the four stages of intellectual growth model and his work created …show more content…

According to McLeod (2012), Piaget had many findings/studies, and published over fourteen works over his studies, some of the works he published were: The Origins of intelligence in Children, The Growth of Logical Thinking From Childhood to Adolescence. None of these works compare to his greatest finding, which is his defining of the four stages of intellectual development. Before this approach was founded there were two other theories to intellectual growth, one being that biology and surroundings create human intellectual make-up and that human intellectual growth was continuous, not discontinuous, the second theory was that we’re pre-programmed on what we could become (citation); moreover, thanks to Piaget, we now know the intellectual development occurs in stages, is discontinuous, occurs at different rates in people and is affected by assimilation and …show more content…

This stage occurs during the age of two and the age of seven. During this stage, children are now developing language and are able to symbolically represent things, places and events. According to Feldman (2017) children show these things through speech, art and physical objects. During this phase egocentrism is the only way of thinking that they have and cannot yet think of courses of action for themselves. Animism is a major factor in this phase, beliefs of children at this stage is that everything that exists has some sort of a conscious and that appearances are deceiving. This stage plays a major role in obedience and exposure to the outside

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